Rob Corddry talks about clowns, nudity and the new season of ‘Childrens Hospital’

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If you haven’t seen an episode of ‘Childrens Hospital,’ which returned Thursday night to Adult Swim, then you’ve missed out on some good clowny, doctory, relationshipy, need-tutorials-on-bedside-mannery fun. The show, created by ‘The Daily Show’s’ Rob Corddry (the doctor in clown makeup -- Blake Downs -- pictured above), is in its third season, so we had a very quick chat with the actor/writer/producer about his creative processes. On his Twitter page, where he live-tweeted the show’s premiere last night, Corddry also announced that Nick Offerman and Sarah Silverman are guests on next week’s episode.

Is ‘Childrens Hospital’ a wackier ‘Scrubs’ for the short-attention-span crowd?

Uhhhh ... No. I would go so far as to say that this show is nothing like ‘Scrubs,’ so please watch it. I’d say it’s like ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ but with [penis] jokes.

What are you watching now, and what were you watching when you came up with the concept for the show?

I don’t think I was watching a lot of anything when I came up with ‘Childrens Hospital.’ Nowadays, my favorite shows are ‘Community,’ ‘Mad Men’ (which I’m in the second season of), just bought ‘Breaking Bad,’ and my favorite show maybe of all time could be ‘Louie’ on FX.

I’m not precious about genres or anything. I’ve also just started rewatching ‘The Sopranos’ too. Sunday nights just haven’t been the same the last couple of years. My wife and I, with David Wain (‘Children’s Hospital’ director) and his wife, watch ‘The Sopranos’ every Sunday night. It’s a lot of fun returning to that.

Everyone from Michael Cera to Henry Winkler to Megan Mullally to Malin Akerman has appeared on the show. How do you approach casting?

Basically, I just cast my friends. I’ve worked with everybody in the cast at least once. If I’ve had fun with you on a movie set, you either have been, or will be, on ‘Children’s Hospital.’ But you know, like anything else, if we write a part, we brainstorm people we think would be right for it, but also go for people we know will have a good comic sensibility.

Is there a drawn-out process for writing? Seems like there are many hands in those scripts.

We get together with a bunch of people and pitch a bunch of ideas. Then we’ll collect those and pick and choose our favorites from a huge outline of ideas. And then we’ll just put ideas together that seem to want to go together. We’ll either write the episodes ourselves or farm them out to friends.

They sometimes seem to be vignettes that merge to form a complete episode.

The most satisfying episodes are the ones where two or three stories intersect. But we definitely stick to a traditional A-B-C sort of structure. The good thing being that we don’t really have to get into it. It’s sort of there to organize all of these jokes because it’s a joke-driven show, not character-driven or story-driven.

What would Dr. Blake do with a patient that had a fear of clowns?

I don’t even think it would register to him. He’s kind of autistic and can’t really read or express emotion. Actually, a kid in this coming season pees himself and my character says, ‘Oh look. He’s peed himself with happiness.’ He just doesn’t get it.

Speaking of the coming season, what can we look forward to?

A lot of partial nudity.

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-- Jevon Phillips